Not Eastern Syrup Pt. 2

Here's the evaporator in action. I built it next to a fence so I could tie a tarp over the set-up to keep the rain out, which worked pretty well. You know how you can sit and watch a fire for hours? When boiling down sap, you get to do this and be productive at the same time! Note the slightly wonky block placement. Things moved around a bit with the heat from the fire. Keep an eye on your bricks and your pans or bad things could happen!

If you’ve been following along, then you know that the big new experiment this March has been to make syrup out of boxelder tree sap. You can store your sap in food grade containers for a few days until you are ready to boil, as long as you keep it cool. Fresh sap is like fresh milk. You want to treat it the same way. I happened to have a few 6 and 7 gallon water containers and a root cellar that is currently at 40 degrees, so it was easy to hold the sap for a few days. A food grade 55 gallon drum with a lid and a spigot would be ideal. 

I built myself a boiler/evaporator out of cinder blocks and two stainless steel hotel pans. Total cost? About $65. If you have some cinder blocks lying around, or can find used hotel pans, you could do this for a lot less. The idea here is to keep the smoke up and away from your boiling sap, so you want the pan to fit down into the fire-box, sealing around the edges, not on top of it. You also want the heat and smoke to draw up and away. I just stacked a few square cinder blocks on some bricks in the fire pit to create a chimney. It worked pretty well.

I first boiled down a gallon of sap in the house, so I could see how the process worked and what it looked like at every stage. I started out in a large pot, and once the sap was reduced to about a quart, I transferred it into a small saute pan to finish. I happen to have a hydrometer (a special device that can measure the density of liquids - used in wine making among other things) and my sap right from the tree was about 98% water. Sugar Maple sap is about 97% (i.e. more sugar), which is why people don’t make boxelder syrup if they have sugar maples. For one gallon of sap, I ended up with just under 1/2 cup of syrup.

Just coming to a boil. This can take a while.

Once I understood the process (and had steamed up my house) I was ready to try out the new outdoor boiler. My larger hotel pan (12″ x 18″ x 6″) holds about 5 gallons, but to give it room to boil, I only filled it about 3/4 full. I also put some sap into the smaller pan, just so it didn’t scorch. As the contents in the larger pan reduced, I ladled sap into the smaller pan (which was also reducing, but slower, as it wasn’t right on top of the fire) and added more sap to the larger pan. I never let the pans get down to less than an inch of sap covering the bottom. As the sap boils, a “scum” or froth will collect on the surface around the edges. This is easily skimmed off with a large spoon (and flicked into the yard, which is kind of fun).

Almost ready...

In all, I boiled off about eleven gallons of sap over the course of an afternoon. (The process of adding more sap over and over gives you a darker finished product. If you are selling maple syrup, the lighter it is the “better” but I for one like a darker syrup.) Once mostly reduced, I poured the sap through a piece of cheesecloth (a bit of ash and debris is unavoidable – screen top covers for the pans would help) into a pot and took it into the house to finish. Have some sacrificial pot holders on hand, as they will get covered in soot from lifting the pans.

We have syrup. Remove from heat NOW!

How do you know when your syrup is done? Well, if you are clever and have a good thermometer, you took the temperature of your sap just as it first reached a rolling boil. Your syrup is finished when the resulting reduced solution reaches 7 degrees above where you started. What I discovered is that you can tell when your syrup is getting close, because the bubbles in the syrup get much smaller. Just as it finishes, your sap will start to expand in the pan and will boil over if you aren’t watching. It will also act like syrup rather than water and collect into a viscus drop when cooled on a metal spoon for a few minutes and then tipped out. I found I didn’t need a thermometer. You are aiming for 67% sugar/33% water in your finished syrup. Much more than this and you will end up with maple sugar rather than syrup. Much less and it won’t keep for very long.

Ready for storage. Note sugar sand.

As the sap reaches its final transformation into syrup, quite a bit of “sugar sand” or “niter” precipitates out of the solution. This is just a mix of minerals and is generally harmless unless you have lead contamination issues with your tree or equipment for some reason. This sugar sand can be filtered out or allowed to settle in your finished syrup overnight and then the clear syrup poured off. I used a piece of wool/poly blend felt as my filter. Too fine a filter (think coffee filter) and you will be there all day waiting for your syrup to pass through. Too course and you won’t remove the sand (cheese cloth will not work).

What I also learned is that if you plan on canning your syrup for long-term storage, don’t bring it up past 180 degrees or more sugar sand will precipitate out. I accidentally boiled mine again when canning, and ended up with a bit of sand at the bottom of my jars. No harm done.

How does the syrup taste? Very good. Not exactly like maple syrup, but definitely well worth eating. This has been a really fun project, and next year, it won’t cost me a thing.

I think my trees are pretty much done for the year. I got started a little late in the season, and we’ve had some warm nights due to rain, rain, and more rain the last few days. I haven’t collected much sap in the last two days. But I’ll leave the taps in for a week or so to see if we get another cold snap.

Now, I need to come up with a better name than Boxelder Syrup. Boxelder makes me think of the boxelder bug (a future post) which is harmless but very annoying. Any ideas?

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011. Ancient coffer syrup, Senior trunk syrup, Old Casket syrup… don’t you love a thesaurus?

This Ain’t No Eastern Maple Syrup

Here's what I needed for my set up. Taps, tubing, hammer to place taps (they don't look like they will fit, but the tree is flexible and they do) and 5/16 drill bit (which I happened to already have).

Sometime last fall, I ran across a reference to making a tree syrup (ala Maple Syrup) from the sap of Boxelder trees. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making maple syrup. I love the idea of a readily available free sweetener, just out there in nature waiting for me to come along.  However, I figured it was a bucket list item that was going to go unkicked, as Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), the tree from which maple syrup is made, does not grow much west of eastern Kansas.  So when I heard about boxelder syrup, I was stoked.

5/16 inch hole, 1 1/2 inches deep.

Boxelder (Acer negundo) IS a type of maple, and is common throughout the United States. Often considered a trash tree, as the wood is soft and the trees are fairly short-lived and prone to splitting, it grows in wet areas, and will reseed readily if conditions are right. Our property here has three large trees (that no doubt were planted), and a variety of smaller ones grown from seed that found the right conditions to germinate.

After doing an extensive internet search, ordering the book “Backyard Sugarin’“, and ordering taps and tubing online (commonly available in every eastern hardware store this time of year, but not so much here in the west), we were ready to give it a try. I shunned the traditional set up with metal taps (called a spile) and metal or wooden (or plastic) buckets, and went with the more modern approach.

Not a bad set up for tapping a few trees. The glass bottles are heavy enough that they tend to stay put. Probably not the best set up if you were tapping a hundred trees.

My taps are 5/16 plastic (a smaller diameter, which is supposed to be healthier for the tree). I am using food grade tubing to run from the tap to a one gallon glass jar on the ground. No worries about hanging the bucket from the tap and having it get heavy and pull out of the tree. No extra expense of buying buckets. No disposable sap bags. (Just what the world needs, more plastic bags. Ugh. No.) I already had the glass jars from my wine making experiments, and they were empty this time of year. Their small opening should help keep debris from falling into the sap. Perfect!

From the moment my trees were tapped, the sap was flowing.

General advise is to only tap trees that are 10 inches in diameter or larger, and to tap them at about chest height on the sunny side of the tree (southeast, south, southwest). Drill hole so that it angles slightly up, and if using the 5/16 taps, only drill in about 1 1/2 inches. You can move the drill in and out to remove any sawdust, and if the sap is flowing, it will quickly push out any remaining residue. Really large trees (more than 20 inches in diameter) can take more than one tap. Timing is everything. The weather should be above freezing during the day, but below freezing at night, which generally means late February through April or so, depending on where you live.

I taped a total of 6 trunks today (one tree is four large trunks), and within about 4 hours, I had about 4 gallons of sap. WOW! The sap will need to be boiled down…a lot. One gallon of sap yields about 4 oz (or 1/2 cup) of syrup. Maybe less, as boxelder sap is not as sweet as sugar maple sap. The boiling off process is generally done outside, as putting that much moisture into your house will take the wall paper off the walls. You can also just drink the sap, which I tried today. It tastes like spring water with a distinct but subtle hint of grassyness.

I’m scrambling to figure out how to store sap until I am ready to boil it, and working on designing a cheap evaporator set up using a metal hotel pan (think steam table pan – wide and shallow – lots of surface area for evaporation). I’ll post again with that design and how the resulting syrup comes out. But I wanted to get this posted, because if you are interested in trying this, NOW is the time.

This four trunk tree now looks like something out of a weird hospital experiment. Note the sap volume. This was taken a few hours after the trees had been tapped. I love it!

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we do actually have some wallpaper we would like to remove, but think we’ll boil our sap down outside anyway.

An Inspired Morning

My habit of late is to get up around 7:30 am, make a cup of tea, check email and Facebook, and read any interesting blogs. This morning, I saw a recipe for grape chili-pepper jelly. I wasn’t interested, both because I think grape jelly is mostly for people under the age of 10, and more importantly, I didn’t have any grapes.

Some of these dried chilies are well past their expiration date, but how do you tell, really?

What I do have is loads of apples. I’ve made apple-plum sauce, apple sauce, apple butter, and a lot of apple crisp. But still the apples keep coming. We picked the last of the tree just before our first really hard frost a few days ago.

I’ve never been much of a fan of apple jelly. It’s a bit too much like grape jelly. Kind of overly sweet and one dimensional. But I do love jalapeno jelly with cream cheese and crackers. Hmmm. Inspiration! I have a lot of dried chilies of all types. Why not an apple jelly with dried chili flakes?

Checking out several recipes online, and the apple jelly and pepper jelly recipes in the Ball Blue Book, nothing quite matched up to where I wanted to go, so I ended up just winging it. Thankfully, apples are very easy to preserve due to their natural acidity and high pectin level, so I had some leeway.

I wanted some vinegar for tang, and not too much sugar, as the apples were already sweet. I ran the apples, cores and all, through the food processor until pulped, then strained (and squeezed – I use the same fruit bags I use for making wine and they are pretty strong) out the juice. The jelly turned out great, with a nice but not-too-much heat and a lovely warm color. I ate the little bit that was left in the pan with some crackers and a soft cheese. Yum. What a great Christmas gift this will be.

OK, a bit of an issue with the chili flakes floating up on the hot syrup before the jelly set, but as this is really a single use serving, not too much of a problem.

 

 

Apple-Dried Chili Jelly

 

• 3 cups apple cider (fresh if possible)
• 1 cup apple-cider vinegar (make sure to get the real stuff – not just “flavored”)
• 2 cups sugar
• Pinch kosher salt
• Chilies (note – all chilies were red and dried. I would estimate the total volume to be about 2 tsp. Experiment with any mix you like)
  • 1 chopped arbol chili, seeds removed
  • 2 sereno chilis, seeds removed
  • 1 small habanero, seeds removed
  • 1 red anaheim (i.e. New Mexican), seeds removed
  • 1/2 tsp aleppo pepper flakes

Combine all ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan and cook down until mixture reaches the jelling point. I used a cold plate, and kept testing the mix until a few drops wrinkled when cooled and pushed with a finger. The mixture was at about 122 degrees when it was ready, but your mixture may vary depending on the apples used and the altitude. Pour into hot sterilized jars and process in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes (longer if you are not at sea level). Made 2 cups.

New to canning? Please check out this site before you start.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from using up all the apples, but enjoying a little heat in the kitchen.

Pickled Walla Walla Sweets 4 Ways

The jar on the front right was the refrigerator batch. You can tell because the onions still look raw. You can also tell which ones were boiled in the brine before canning, as they are more translucent.

I have this depression era reaction to fresh abundant inexpensive produce. I buy a lot of it. Even if I don’t quite know what to do with it all. OK, the first step is admitting you have a problem, right? 

Thus was the situation when I saw a 25 lb bag of Walla Walla Sweet Onions for the bargain basement price of $10 back in July. They were huge. They were just harvested. They were sweet and wonderful. The issue is that sweet onions (like Walla Walla, Maui and Vidalia) do not store for long periods of time. They are a seasonal item (which is part of why people go nuts for them). 

But thanks to the proliferation of great preserving blogs out there, I ran across a recipe for red onions pickled with mustard and dill. Hmmm. Never really thought about pickled onions, but because I don’t like the sharp taste and lingering after effects of raw onions on burgers, brats and other traditional fare, a pickled onion on the same might be just what I’ve been looking for. Something new to try…and a way to use up some onions. Inspiration! 

I’m really not a big fan of dill in anything but a cucumber pickle (I don’t even like it on fish). But the spices added to pickles of any kind are really at the cooks discretion. And no reason one should not pickle a sweet rather than a red onion. I decided rather than make one big batch, I’d try out three different brines (two from a great article in Eating Well magazine – one sweet and one sour – which unfortunately is NOT on their website) and several different spice combinations and see which one I liked best for next year. 

Small Batch Pickled Walla Walla Sweets Four Ways 

Brine #1 (makes enough for two pints, with some left over) 

• ½ cup sugar
• 2 ½ cups apple cider vinegar
• ½ tbsp canning salt
• 1 ½ lbs walla walla sweet onions, cut into slivers

Bring brine to boil. Pour over onions in large bowl. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes. Place spices in bottom of two sterilized pint jars. Using tongs, place onions into jars until evenly distributed. Quickly reheat brine, then pour into jars, leaving ¼ inch head space. Bubble jars. Process in boiling water bath canner for 15 minutes. 

Jar #1 

Brine #1 plus: 

• ½ tsp whole mustard seed
• ¼ tsp celery seed
• ¼ tsp whole peppercorns

Jar #2 

Brine #1 plus: 

• ½ tsp pickling spice

Brine #2 (Eating Well “Get Pickled, Sweet Pickle Brine” August 2010 issue – enough for 1 pint, with some extra) 

• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup water
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 tsp canning salt + rounded ¼ tsp salt (total 1 1/3 tsp)
• ¾ lb walla walla sweet onions, cut into slivers

Brine #3 (Eating Well “Get Pickled, Sour Pickle Brine” August 2010 issue enough for 1 pint, with some extra) 

• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 2 tsp canning salt + rounded ½ tsp canning salt (total 2 2/3 tsp)
• 2 tsp sugar
• ¾ lb walla walla sweet onions, cut into slivers
• 1 clove garlic, split
• 1 small jalapeno, split and seeded

Bring brines to boil in two separate pots. Add onions and simmer 5 minutes. Place spices in bottom of two sterilized pint jars. Using tongs, place onions into jars until evenly distributed (leave garlic behind, but keep jalapeno with onions). Pour hot brine into jars, leaving ¼ inch head space. Bubble jars. Process in boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes. 

Jar #3 

Brine #2 plus: 

• ½ tsp pickling spice

Jar #4 

Brine #3 plus: 

• ½ tsp whole mustard seed
• 1/8 tsp celery seed
• 1/8 tsp whole peppercorns

Why the longer process time on jars 1 and 2? Because the onions are not cooked in the brine before hand, I treated this as a “cold pack” rather than a “hot pack” recipe. It will be interesting to see if they retain more “crunch” over time. 

What to do with that left over brine? I threw it all together, sliced some more onions, and put the whole lot together in the frige with some spice to make refrigerator pickles. So far, I’ve really enjoyed them. Looking forward to trying the rest. Give the recipe a try and let me know what spice combinations are your favorites.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from finishing up the last of 25 lbs of onions, but we’re not crying about it.

Mango Chutney

OK, this batch was made with dried cranberries, because I was out of raisins and the store is 40 minutes away round trip. Don't tell anyone!

The winter of 5th grade, I was living in Coronado, California, a burg just south of San Diego that is 1/2 naval base. Having lived most of my life up to that point in rural Missouri and Idaho, the multiethnic, multilingual, cosmopolitan feel of Coronado was very new to me.

I was also on the cusp of puberty, and beginning to realize that the world did not totally revolve around me and my immediate needs and wants. If I paid attention, there was some really interesting stuff going on around me. And still being a kid, I could often observe the world quietly without anyone taking notice of me.

My mother had an old friend who had lived in the area forever. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas she decided to throw a dinner party. We spent the day at her house “helping” put the party together. What she served was turkey curry (no doubt made from left over turkey from thanksgiving).

I had never had curry before. I was a pretty picky eater and tended to stick to tried and true kid foods. (When I discovered that thousand island dressing was just mayo and ketchup mixed together with a bit of pickle relish I was thrilled, and often took over my mother’s friends’ kitchens to make some for myself, since no way was I going to eat a salad dressed with anything but thousand island, which no one ever had on hand. Thankfully for me at the time, everyone was still married to iceberg lettuce.) But the smell of the curry permeated the house all day and it smelled, well, really really good.

When dinner was finally served, there was rice and curry (no doubt made with a simple jar of “curry” spice from the store) and lots and lots of condiments. Chopped hard-boiled egg, peanuts, raisins, shredded coconut, and of course, Major Grey’s Chutney. I piled it on. I ate it all. I felt decidedly worldly and grown up.

I also completely dominated the evening of a nice woman who took an interest in me and asked me about myself. No one ever asked me about myself. At least not more than “what is your favorite subject in school”. To this day, I am grateful to her for taking a genuine interest (and still kind of embarrassed at my magpie-like behavior – blame it on budding hormones – or the realization that sometimes it was fun to actually participate rather than just observe).

Dice mangos to bite sized pieces.

To this day, I still love all things curry, including the smell. Over the years, it has become harder and harder to find Major Grey’s chutney (which is just a mango chutney made with lime and tamarind). One day, in a fit of desperation, I did an internet search. I’ve been making my own and using this recipe ever since (no tamarind, but close enough). I make a batch every year when I see a good price on mangos.

Mango Chutney
Adapted from Mango Chutney in Hot & Spicy Foods by Louise Steele

Makes about 28 oz (or 3 1/2 8oz jars – put the 1/2 jar in the fridge rather than canning it). Can easily be doubled.

• 3 barely ripe mangos (I use two large – which when peeled, chopped and removed from the pit equal about 1 1/2 lbs of fruit)
• One 3/4″ piece ginger root, grated (the sciencey part of me always hate this type of direction since ginger root is not “standardized” size wise, but I love ginger, so no chance of having too much. If you cover your ginger grater with plastic wrap before starting, removing the grated ginger is a snap – thanks Alton!)
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• 1/8 cup onion, finely chopped
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (less if you don’t like spicy)
• 1/4 tsp fresh toasted ground cumim
• 1/2 tsp fenugreek
• 1 1/4 cups apple cider vinegar (recently read a label and saw apple cider “flavored” vinegar – which was just white vinegar with flavoring. Look for vinegar made from actual apple cider)
• 1/2 cup golden raisins (regular would be fine too – the golden is more of a visual thing)
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1 1/4 cup light brown sugar

Once all ingredients are in the pot, cook down until thickened.

Peel and slice mangos into small dice. (You can peel mangos with a vegetable peeler pretty easily, then slice the mango meat off the pit – be careful, they are slippery buggers).  Heat mangos, onion, ginger, garlic, salt, cayenne, cumin and fenugreek in thick bottomed pot over medium heat. Cook gently until heated through while stirring, about 2 minutes.

Stir in vinegar, raisins, lime juice and sugar.  Heat slowly to dissolve
sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer, uncovered, 35 – 40 minutes or until liquid thickens and becomes syrupy and mangos look translucent, stirring frequently.

Pour into heated and sterilized 8 oz jars, filling to 1/4 inch head space. Process in water bath canner for 10 minutes, or longer, adjusted for your altitude.

Note: while this recipe did not come from a “tested recipe” site, it did come from a book that directed how it should be canned. It is also close enough to a tested recipe for mango chutney, in terms of fruit/onion to vinegar ratio, that I feel comfortable saying it is safe. However, can at your own risk. If you are worried about it, just refrigerate and use within a month.

New to canning? Please check out this site before you start.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from India or Thailand, but still make a mean curry.

I Can Put Up With a Few Pricks!

Beautiful bountiful blackberries!

I have occasion to travel to Walla Walla Washington, and while there a few weeks ago, I could not help notice the HUGE banks of wild blackberry bushes along the creek at Rooks Park. It was going to be a banner year for blackberries.

I returned last week and on a still cool Tuesday morning at 7:30, armed with long sleeves,  long thick pants and a five gallon bucket, I got to work. I was serenaded by bull frogs, startled by a great blue heron lifting off, and generally given a variety of weird looks by the local walkers, joggers and bikers. The berries were JUST getting ripe. Ungloved fingers were necessary in order to judge ripeness (unripe berries, even when black, don’t release easily; overripe berries squish in your fingers).   

Bucket O' Berries. Yum!

 While picking, I also spent some quality time getting branches untangled from my hair, pulling the occasional thorn from a finger and wishing I had remembered to change into closed toed shoes (insert colorful language here). Blackberries are thorny mothers. I picked for three hours (it’s hard to stop when there are SO MANY), working my way up, down, and into the brambles. And all the while I kept thinking, “Where the hell IS everyone? These are NOT cheap at the store. This is beautiful tasty free food.” Perhaps I didn’t get the memo that it is not cool to pick blackberries, as they are considered a weed in the area. Oh well. More for me!

Later that day, home with my bounty, I decided to make Blackberry-Apricot jam. I like combining seasonal fruits into jam, and blackberries and apricots seemed like a good combination. To read some canning books, the world will end and everyone will die of botulism if you should ever stray from a tested, printed, blessed by the National Center for Home Food Preservation or your local extension office recipe. And honestly, this is generally good advice. People don’t follow directions (or even read them). I listened to a talk show/call in with canning questions the other day and a woman could not figure out why her water bath canned green beans would not stay sealed after a week or two. (You should never water bath can non acidic foods – fruit is naturally acidic. Her cans would not stay sealed because they were releasing gas and pushing the tops off as they rotted in the jar. Yikes!)  

Got to love this color combo

That said, there is no reason why you can’t mix and match jam ingredients, other than running the risk of the mixture not jelling properly. I get around this issue by using a low/no sugar pectin. Using the packet insert that came with the pectin, I looked up their recipes for Apricot jam and Blackberry jam. Apricot = 6 cups chopped fruit, four and a half cups sugar, 2 tbls lemon juice. Blackberry = 5 cups of crushed fruit, 4 cups sugar.  Therefore Apricot-Blackberry jam equals 3 cups Apricots, 2 1/2 cups Blackberries, 1 tbls lemon juice, 4 1/4 cups sugar. Simple enough.   

Baxter, my BIG tabby, decided he really needed some attention. I'm hel-ping

I also canned 3 pints of berries in their own juice with a little sugar (for yogurt topping on some winter’s day) and froze almost a gallon of the berries with nothing added (freeze on a cookie sheet individually before putting into a zip top bag to avoid one giant frozen wad).

I still had apricots, so also made a batch of brandied apricot jam with vanilla. This one I did the old fashioned way, with no added pectin (thinking that the more “cooked” flavor would go well with the brandy and vanilla). Traditional jam is made by cooking the jam until it reaches the magic jelling point (which can take a while and is likely directly proportional to how much jam has splattered onto your stove, floor, and counters. I had to mop the floor when I was done).

Baxter decided I was spending WAY too much time in the kitchen and it was time to pay attention to him instead. When I didn’t stop what I was doing, he jumped up onto the counter and placed himself on the Ball Blue Book page explaining how to test for the jelling point. Guess he showed me (and made me realize perhaps why a commercial kitchen is required to be in a separate building from the home dwelling. No one wants cat hair in their jam)!

It’s probably good I don’t live in Walla Walla. If I did I’d be out there now, still picking.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from a store bought blackberry, and our fingers are stained purple.

Cherries 2.0

Christmas in August

Last week, I went up to Green Bluff in search of Apricots. I am one of those rare people who LOVES apricots. I love them out of hand, and I love them in jam and whatever else I can think of. So every year, I make some version of apricot jam, often mixed with some other seasonal fruit (Apricot-Raspberry and Apricot-Orange were past successes). 

Returning from the apricot farm, my warm fuzzy globes of goodness riding in the trunk, and I pass…what’s this…a sign for cherries? I thought cherry season was over. I stop, talk to the short man with graying hair and a braid in his beard (insert reference to Lord of the Rings here), and ask if they have pie cherries. Sure, he says. There are a couple of big trees behind the house. 

I wind my way past the farm implements half buried in weeds and bags of, for the benefit of the doubt we’ll say recycling, and there, looking like a Christmas tree in August, is a loaded pie cherry tree that no one has touched. Whoo hoo! I pick about 5 lbs of cherries, while being serenaded by someone in the house playing guitar. Imagine Bela Fleck warming up with a hang over, but with quite a bit less talent. Sort of a directionless jazz riff, with a kick drum thrown in for good measure. But it doesn’t matter. Because there are lots and lots of cherries! 

Home with my prize, it now turns out I CAN make a cherry pie. And dry a few extra as well. 

Cherry Spritzer.

After pitting the cherries I rinsed them a second time (the “recycling” had me a bit spooked). I throw them in a pot with sugar and corn starch, following a Ball Blue Book recipe. Come to realize that there was probably a bit more water on/in the cherries than anticipated, and I had a lot of corn starch thickened juice left over once I had strained off and frozen the cherry pie filling. 

Hmmmm. Bet this would make a tasty cherry spritzer (cherry juice and club soda). Or a killer cherry margarita (confirmed later in the week with the husband. We just let the cherry juice stand in for the triple sec). 

I also make a batch of Sour Cherry-Apricot jam, which might be a new favorite. Life, as they say, is good.

Bacon is Meat Candy

The final product

OK, I admit this is not an original tag line. I saw it on a t-shirt being worn by Rick Bayless on a PBS cooking show (Rick Bayless is my favorite Mexican cook book author). But I do love bacon, and so the phrase has stuck with me.

A few days ago, I ventured into my 2nd foray into making my own bacon. We purchased a half hog last year, and I asked the butcher to leave the pork belly whole. It was finally time to unthaw that sucker and get it cured and smoked.

A few years ago, Alton Brown (my favorite TV chef. Food, science, sock puppets…what’s not to love?) did an episode called Scrap Iron Chef, where he smoked his own bacon. There are five recipes from the show, and the first time I made my own bacon, I cut the pork belly up into five chunks and tried them all.

Our favorite, surprisingly, was the Honey Mustard Cure (followed closely by the Scrap Iron Chef Brine recipe). What is nice about the honey mustard recipe is that it is a cure (dry), rather than a brine (wet). Since a whole pork belly weighs in at 6 – 8 lbs, having gallons of liquid brine in a bag in your fridge can be a bit of a challenge. A cure, on the other hand, makes the fridge time a breeze.

Pork belly after day one of honey mustard cure

So, after the belly was thawed in a cooler in the root cellar for a day, I cut it up into four two-pound chunks, slathered them with honey (using home-grown honey from my bees in Colorado) and freshly ground mustard powder (since I didn’t have enough on hand and had to make more – thank goodness for the electric coffee mill). I then packed on the sugar/salt cure, layered the chunks into an oversized zip top bag, and placed it on a half sheet pan in my fridge. (I had to clip the top, as the cure was in the zipper groves and it wouldn’t seal – I think these oversized bags were meant for clothing, so my use was somewhat unconventional).

Every day, I flipped the bag over to let the pieces marinate evenly. Because the salt/sugar mixture pulls moisture from the meat, there was some liquid in the bag after a day or so. The belly was cured for three days. (Note: a friend of mine, following a different recipe, cured her bacon for a week. It was WAY to salty. Three days is probably about the maximum here.)

Forming pellicle (skin) in front of a box fan

On the third day, it was show time. First, I rinsed the cured pieces of belly. Then, (and this is important), I patted them with paper towels and then dried them in front of a fan for an hour to form the pellicle, which is essentially a skin that allows the smoke particles to stick. (I rotated the rack 1/4 turn every 15 minutes.)

Now, time to smoke. I inherited a Little Chief electric smoker from my father years ago. They run about $100 on Amazon. You can also make your own Flower Pot Smoker (again ala Alton Brown) for about $50. While it would have been better to cold smoke the bacon, (which is possible with the Little Chief if you still have the box it came in…which I don’t) our regular cold smoker (a post for another time) is currently out of commission, so I opted for a heated smoke. I lost a bit of bacon fat, but otherwise the pieces were none the worse for wear.

We inherited several apple trees when we bought this property, and they came with A LOT of dead wood. So I now have enough apple wood to smoke pretty much everything for the next 10 years. Don’t have an apple tree? No problem. You can buy wood chips for smoking (usually either mesquite or hickory) in most any store that sells grills and charcoal.

Applewood smoke escaping from the smoker

Four hours of smoking later, and the bacon was done. Each piece was put into its own zip top freezer bag and frozen. I leave my bacon frozen until I need some. I pull it out about 15 minutes before I need it, and then slice off a few pieces (it’s easier to slice when it is still almost frozen). While I love bacon, I do not eat it every day, (lets face it, it still has a lot of saturated fat, even if it is homemade) so this keeps it from spoiling before I can use it up.

So, why go through this whole process when you can just go buy bacon at the store? 1) I just like knowing how to do this kind of thing. Call it genetic, but I’d rather figure out how to smoke bacon than play a video game any day. 2) I know exactly what is in this meat. I know where it came from. I know it was raised and butchered in a humane way. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients. No sodium phosphates, sodium ascorbate or sodium nitrite added.  3) It didn’t cost me much, since I already had the smoker and the apple wood and honey. Sugar and salt are cheap. I’m not sure what a pound of pork belly costs at the butcher, but I bet it is way less than buying name brand bacon in its plastic wrapper shipped from who knows how far away. 4) Most important? It tastes flippin’ fantastic.

Now…if only the tomatoes would get ripe so I can make a bacon, tomato and grilled cheese sandwich!

Miles Away Farm Blog ©, where we still smell a bit like wood smoke, but are savoring every salty sweet bacony bite.